Peer-to-peer billing methods are known in the art that enable one or more wireless clients to pay for a communication service used by one or more free wireless clients. However, there are several limitations while calculating the exact bill for each session utilized by each of the wireless clients. In the existing peer-to-peer billing methods there is no service interaction between a plurality of wireless clients participating in the communication service through a call processing server. Therefore, factors such as a change of wireless network and a change of tariff or quality of service for each wireless client are not considered while calculating the bill. Only service information of the wireless client who has agreed to pay is considered while calculating the bill.
Further, in the existing peer-to-peer billing methods, information about simultaneous multiple services that a wireless client might be involved in during the session, is difficult to collect. If during the session, a wireless client seamlessly roams through multiple wireless networks, the service charges might vary as per the particular wireless network that is being used. Therefore, it becomes difficult to estimate the exact bill for the wireless client for the session or choose an optimum quality of service, for example, the wireless client cannot choose a slower service with a lower cost.
Additionally, in the existing peer-to-peer billing methods, if a wireless client uses a pre-paid billing, the session cannot be extended beyond a specified pre-paid amount. And again in pre-paid billing, it is difficult to calculate the charge for multiple sessions that are accessed simultaneously.
Moreover, in conventional peer-to-peer billing methods, a bill for a communication service is calculated at a coprocessor in the network. For this purpose, the coprocessor collects all the information corresponding to a session to be billed. Therefore, all the wireless clients are required to communicate with the coprocessor via their respective access points, for the coprocessor to generate the bill. Thus, even if two wireless clients that are involved in a session are associated with a same access point, the two wireless clients have to communicate with the coprocessor to generate a bill for the session.
Therefore, there is a need for a method and a system that provides accurate peer-to-peer billing for the session by dynamically calculating the bill depending on various factors, such as the additional services that are simultaneously used by each wireless clients during a session, wireless clients roaming between different wireless networks, and a desired quality of service. Also, there is a need for a method and a system that can obviate a need of a coprocessor while calculating a peer-to-peer bill.